This blog on Texas education contains posts on accountability, testing, college readiness, dropouts, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, race, class, and gender issues with additional focus at the national level.

Wednesday, July 22, 2015

The United States has the second highest number of Spanish speakers
in the world—more than Spain and second after Mexico, according to a report published this week by the Instituto Cervantes.
It’s a finding that confirms the importance of Spanish in the U.S.
and the importance of the U.S. in the Spanish-speaking world, a level of
significance that will only rise in the future.
About 470 million people in the world speak Spanish as their native
language; another 89 million speak the language to some level. Mexico,
with 121 million Spanish speakers, represents far and above the largest
population of Spanish speakers, while the U.S. has 53 million Spanish
speakers (41 million of those native speakers).
The two North American countries are followed by Colombia (48 million), Spain (47 million), and Argentina (42 million).
By 2050, the U.S. will overtake Mexico as the largest
Spanish-speaking country in the world, the report predicts, thanks to
increased population growth in Latino communities. More than half of the
country’s population growth between 2000 and 2010 came from Latinos,
the report says, and more than 73 percent of Latino families in the U.S.
speak Spanish in their home.
The report also explores the impact of Spanish on the internet: it’s
the third top language used on the web, after English and Chinese. It’s
also the number two language on Facebook, the number two language on
Wikipedia in terms of visits, and the number three language on Twitter
after English and Japanese.

Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Great AFT-sponsored video! We are so fortunate to have teacher Maria Dominguez, first-grade bilingual teacher at Rodriguez Elementary School, a Title I school in Austin, Texas, as one of our great teachers within our district.

It helped her to "come out of the shadows and have a sense of belonging." Besides being a teacher, she is now personally involved in advocacy in the community and counts herself among the 650,000 DREAMers who have benefited from DACA (i.e., are "DACA-mented").

I am perpetually impressed with our DREAMers/DACA-mented students. They continue to demonstrate just how much they have to offer our children, schools, and country. This is the demographic of destiny and we are all the better for it.

Wednesday, July 15, 2015

Great reflection by John Metta on the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that whites reinscribe racism in U.S. society. This came from a sermon that the author delivered. He opened his sermon with this quote from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie​ who is on target:

“The only reason you say that race was not an issue is because you wish it was not. We all wish it was not. But it’s a lie. I came from a country where race was not an issue; I did not think of myself as black and I only became black when I came to America. When you are black in America and you fall in love with a white person, race doesn’t matter when you’re alone together because it’s just you and your love. But the minute you step outside, race matters. But we don’t talk about it. We don’t even tell our white partners the small things that piss us off and the things we wish they understood better, because we’re worried they will say we’re overreacting, or we’re being too sensitive. And we don’t want them to say, Look how far we’ve come, just forty years ago it would have been illegal for us to even be a couple blah blah blah, because you know what we’re thinking when they say that? We’re thinking why the fuck should it ever have been illegal anyway? But we don’t say any of this stuff. We let it pile up inside our heads and when we come to nice liberal dinners like this, we say that race doesn’t matter because that’s what we’re supposed to say, to keep our nice liberal friends comfortable. It’s true. I speak from experience.”

― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

Central quote:

"But here is the irony, here's the thing that all the angry Black people
know, and no calmly debating White people want to admit: The entire discussion of race in America centers around the protection of White feelings."

A
couple weeks ago, I was debating what I was going to talk about in this
sermon. I told Pastor Kelly Ryan I had great reservations talking about
the one topic that I think about every single day.
Then, a
terrorist massacred nine innocent people in a church that I went to, in a
city that I still think of as home. At that point, I knew that despite
any misgivings, I needed to talk about race.
You see, I don't talk about race with White people. To illustrate why, I'll tell a story:
It
was probably about 15 years ago when a conversation took place between
my aunt, who is White and lives in New York State, and my sister, who is
Black and lives in North Carolina. This conversation can be distilled
to a single sentence, said by my Black sister:
"The only
difference between people in The North and people in The South is that
down here, at least people are honest about being racist."
There
was a lot more to that conversation, obviously, but I suggest that it
can be distilled into that one sentence because it has been, by my White
aunt. Over a decade later, this sentence is still what she talks about.
It has become the single most important aspect of my aunt's
relationship with my Black family. She is still hurt by the suggestion
that people in New York, that she, a northerner, a liberal, a good
person who has Black family members, is a racist.
This perfectly illustrates why I don't talk about race with White people. Even- or rather, especially- my own family.
I
love my aunt. She's actually my favorite aunt, and believe me, I have a
lot of awesome aunts to choose from. But the facts are actually quite
in my sister's favor on this one.New York State is one of the most segregated states
in the country. Buffalo, New York where my aunt lives is one of the 10
most segregated school systems in the country. The racial inequality of
the area she inhabits is so bad that it has been the subject of reports
by the Civil Rights Action Network and the NAACP.
Those, however,
are facts that my aunt does not need to know. She does not need to live
with the racial segregation and oppression of her home. As a white
person with upward mobility, she has continued to improve her situation.
She moved out of the area I grew up in- she moved to an area with
better schools. She doesn't have to experience racism, and so it is not
real to her.
Nor does it dawn on her that the very fact that she
moved away from an increasingly Black neighborhood to live in a White
suburb might itself be a aspect of racism. She doesn't need to realize
that "better schools" exclusively means "whiter schools."
I don't
talk about race with White people because I have so often seen it go
nowhere. When I was younger, I thought it was because all white people
are racist. Recently, I've begun to understand that it's more nuanced
than that.
To understand, you have to know that Black people think
in terms of Black people. We don't see a shooting of an innocent Black
child in another state as something separate from us because we know
viscerally that it could be our child, our parent, or us, that is shot.
The
shooting of Walter Scott in North Charleston resonated with me because
Walter Scott was portrayed in the media as a deadbeat and a criminal-
but when you look at the facts about the actual man, he was nearly
indistinguishable from my own father.
Racism affects us directly
because the fact that it happened at a geographically remote location or
to another Black person is only a coincidence, an accident. It could
just as easily happen to us- right here, right now.
Black people
think in terms of we because we live in a society where the social and
political structures interact with us as Black people.

White people do not think in terms of we. White people have the
privilege to interact with the social and political structures of our
society as individuals. You are "you," I am "one of them." Whites are
often not directly affected by racial oppression even in their own
community, so what does not affect them locally has little chance of
affecting them regionally or nationally. They have no need, nor often
any real desire, to think in terms of a group. They are supported by the
system, and so are mostly unaffected by it.
What they are
affected by are attacks on their own character. To my aunt, the
suggestion that "people in The North are racist" is an attack on her as a
racist. She is unable to differentiate her participation within a
racist system (upwardly mobile, not racially profiled, able to move to
White suburbs, etc.) from an accusation that she, individually, is a
racist. Without being able to make that differentiation, White people in
general decide to vigorously defend their own personal non-racism, or
point out that it doesn't exist because they don't see it.
The
result of this is an incessantly repeating argument where a Black person
says "Racism still exists. It is real," and a white person argues
"You're wrong, I'm not racist at all. I don't even see any racism." My
aunt's immediate response is not "that is wrong, we should do better."
No, her response is self-protection: "That's not my fault, I didn't do
anything. You are wrong."
Racism is not slavery. As President Obama said,
it's not avoiding the use of the word Nigger. Racism is not white water
fountains and the back of the bus. Martin Luther King did not end
racism. Racism is a cop severing the spine of an innocent man. It is a
12 year old child being shot for playing with a toy gun in a state where
it is legal to openly carry firearms.
But racism is even more
subtle than that. It's more nuanced. Racism is the fact that "White"
means "normal" and that anything else is different. Racism is our
acceptance of an all white Lord of the Rings cast because of historical accuracy, ignoring the fact that this is a world with an entirely fictionalized history.
Even when we make shit up, we want it to be white.
And
racism is the fact that we all accept that it is white. Benedict
Cumberbatch playing Khan in Star Trek. Khan, who is from India. Is there
anyone Whiter than Benedict fucking Cumberbatch? What? They needed a
"less racial" cast because they already had the Black Uhura character?
That is racism. Once you let yourself see it, it's there all the time.
Black
children learn this when their parents give them "The Talk." When they
are sat down at the age of five or so and told that their best friend's
father is not sick, and not in a bad mood- he just doesn't want his son
playing with you. Black children grow up early to life in The Matrix.
We're not given a choice of the red or blue pill. Most white people,
like my aunt, never have to choose. The system was made for White
people, so White people don't have to think about living in it.
But we can't point this out.
Living every single day with institutionalized racism and then having
to argue its very existence, is tiring, and saddening, and angering.
Yet if we express any emotion while talking about it, we're tone
policed, told we're being angry. In fact, a key element in any racial
argument in America is the Angry Black person, and racial discussions
shut down when that person speaks. The Angry Black person invalidates
any arguments about racism because they are "just being overly
sensitive," or "too emotional," or- playing the race card. Or even
worse, we're told that we are being racist (Does any intelligent person
actually believe a systematically oppressed demographic has the ability
to oppress those in power?)
But here is the irony, here's the
thing that all the angry Black people know, and no calmly debating White
people want to admit: The entire discussion of race in America centers around the protection of White feelings.
Ask
any Black person and they'll tell you the same thing. The reality of
thousands of innocent people raped, shot, imprisoned, and systematically
disenfranchised are less important than the suggestion that a single
White person might be complicit in a racist system.
This is the country we live in. Millions of Black lives are valued less than a single White person's hurt feelings.
White
people and Black people are not having a discussion about race. Black
people, thinking as a group, are talking about living in a racist
system. White people, thinking as individuals, refuse to talk about "I,
racist" and instead protect their own individual and personal goodness.
In doing so, they reject the existence of racism.
But arguing about personal non-racism is missing the point.
Despite
what the Charleston Massacre makes things look like, people are dying
not because individuals are racist, but because individuals are helping
support a racist system by wanting to protect their own non-racist self
beliefs.
People are dying because we are supporting a racist system that justifies White people killing Black people.
We
see this in the way that one Muslim killer is a sign of Islamic terror;
in the way one Mexican thief is a pointer to the importance of border
security; in one innocent, unarmed Black man is shot in the back by a
cop, then sullied in the media as a thug and criminal.
And in the
way a white racist in a state that still flies the confederate flag is
seen as "troubling" and "unnerving." In the way people "can't understand
why he would do such a thing."
A white person smoking pot is a
"Hippie" and a Black person doing it is a "criminal." It's evident in
the school to prison pipeline and the fact that there are close to 20
people of color in prison for every white person.
There's a headline from The Independent
that sums this up quite nicely: "Charleston shooting: Black and Muslim
killers are 'terrorists' and 'thugs'. Why are white shooters called
'mentally ill'?"
I'm gonna read that again: "Black and Muslim
killers are 'terrorists' and 'thugs'. Why are white shooters called
'mentally ill'?"
Did you catch that? It's beautifully subtle. This
is an article talking specifically about the different way we treat
people of color in this nation and even in this article's headline, the
white people are "shooters" and the Black and Muslim people are
"killers."
Even when we're talking about racism, we're using
racist language to make people of color look dangerous and make White
people come out as not so bad.
Just let that sink in for a minute, then ask yourself why Black people are angry when they talk about race.
The
reality of America is that White people are fundamentally good, and so
when a white person commits a crime, it is a sign that they, as an
individual, are bad. Their actions as a person are not indicative of any
broader social construct. Even the fact that America has a growing
number of violent hate groups, populated mostly by white men, and that
nearly *all* serial killers are white men can not shadow the fundamental
truth of white male goodness. In fact, we like White serial killers so
much, we make mini-series about them.
White people are good as a whole, and only act badly as individuals.
People
of color, especially Black people (but boy we can talk about "The
Mexicans" in this community), are seen as fundamentally bad. There might
be a good one- and we are always quick to point them out to our
friends, show them off as our Academy Award for "Best Non-Racist in a
White Role"- but when we see a bad one, it's just proof that the rest
are, as a rule, bad.
This, all of this, expectation, treatment,
thought, the underlying social system that puts White in the position of
Normal and good, and Black in the position of "other" and "bad," all of
this, is racism.
And White people, every single one of you, are complicit in this racism because you benefit directly from it.
This
is why I don't like the story of the good samaritan. Everyone likes to
think of themselves as the person who sees someone beaten and bloodied
and helps him out.
That's too easy.
If I could re-write that
story, I'd rewrite it from the perspective of Black America. What if
the person wasn't beaten and bloody? What if it wasn't so obvious? What
if they were just systematically challenged in a thousand small ways
that actually made it easier for you to succeed in life?
Would you be so quick to help then, or would you, like most White people, stay silent and let it happen.
Here's
what I want to say to you: Racism is so deeply embedded in this country
not because of the racist right-wing radicals who practice it openly,
it exists because of the silence and hurt feelings of liberal America.
That's
what I want to say, but really, I can't. I can't say that because I've
spent my life not talking about race to White people. In a big way, it's
my fault. Racism exists because I, as a Black person, don't challenge
you to look at it.
Racism exists because I, not you, am silent.
But
I'm caught in the perfect Catch 22, because when I start pointing out
racism, I become the Angry Black Person, and the discussion shuts down
again. So I'm stuck.
All the Black voices in the world speaking
about racism all the time do not move White people to think about it-
but one White John Stewart talking about Charleston has a whole lot of
White people talking about it. That's the world we live in. Black people
can't change it while White people are silent and deaf to our words.
White
people are in a position of power in this country because of racism.
The question is: Are they brave enough to use that power to speak
against the system that gave it to them?
So I'm asking you to help
me. Notice this. Speak up. Don't let it slide. Don't stand watching in
silence. Help build a world where it never gets to the point where the
Samaritan has to see someone bloodied and broken.
As for me, I
will no longer be silent. I'm going to try to speak kindly, and softly,
but that's gonna be hard. Because it's getting harder and harder for me
to think about the protection of White people's feelings when White
people don't seem to care at all about the loss of so many Black lives.This blog was originally published on Medium.com.

The U.S. becomes the
second-largest Spanish-speaking country in the world when taking into
account bilingual speakers. (Photo : Todd Warshaw/Getty Images)

The United States stands right behind Mexico as the largest Spanish-speaking country in the world.

According to a new study published by Instituto Cervantes, the
U.S. is home to 41 million native Spanish speakers and 11.6 million are
also counted as bilingual. The new data places the U.S. above Colombia,
which has 48 million, and Spain, which can claim 46 million Spanish
speakers.Mexico still leads the pack with 121 million Spanish speakers.As reported in The Guardian,
The Instituto Cervantes, a worldwide non-profit organization created by
the Spanish government in 1991 to promote the Spanish language, offers
educational courses and last year boasted more than 200,000 students
registered.

The organization cites a U.S. Census Office report which estimates
that the U.S. will have 138 million Spanish speakers by the year 2050. The highest concentration of Spanish speakers hail from New Mexico, California, Texas and Arizona.So whatever an unorthodox politician such as Donald Trump wants to
say about Mexico, or however much a right-wing talk show host like Michael Savage would
like to stress a policy of “borders, language, and culture,” the
political reality is that unless hopeful candidates are comfortable
speaking Spanish they might soon find themselves at a serious
disadvantage.According to Rice University political scientist Mark Jones, a
candidate’s ability to speak Spanish gives the aspirant a definite
edge with Latino voters no matter what the political affiliation. Speaking to the Texas Tribune in
2013, Jones said, “Any Hispanic politician that doesn’t have that skill
set is disadvantaged, in part, because they don’t have the ability to
connect in the same way with a key segment of the voting public.”For U.S. politicians being able to speak Spanish may be common sense.
“If you interact in Spanish with Spanish speakers, you have a much
richer and more contemplated understanding of issues important to those
people,” said Jones.

Excellent analysis by Darnell Moore of power relations and their interwovenness with patriarchy and patriarchal power evidenced in the Bill Cosby affair.

-Angela

After trailblazing black model and actress Beverly Johnson publicly alleged in an emotional and stirring Vanity
Fair essay that she, too, had been sexually assaulted by Bill Cosby, she was ridiculed and discredited by many.

The backlash wasn't surprising. Devoted fans and celebrity friends of
Cosby have long stood
by the beloved symbol of (caricatured) black heterosexual manhood, even as the list of women accusing him of sexual assault has grown to include more than 40 names.

After Johnson's story ran, for example, black male commentator Cleo Manago postulated that
Cosby might actually be the victim of an ostensible white-woman coup to
take a good black man down, or of the "guilty until proven guilty"
rhetoric historically aimed at black men. Boyce Watkins, a black scholar
and social commentator, expressed similar views,
noting that while his thoughts about Cosby were "deliberately mixed,"
the growing number of allegations were akin to a "modern day lynching"
and "too consistent and orchestrated ... to believe that it's all
happening by chance." Attorney Monique Pressley similarly questioned the
"sheer volume of accusers" and stated "you'll have some people who will
come forward and join the band wagon" during a News One Now Straight Talk episode with Roland Martin.

The support of Cosby by black men and women who
might otherwise consider themselves
freedom fighters in the struggle for black liberation has been
perplexing at best and hypocritical at worst, especially when
considering that some of Cosby's alleged victims were black, too. It
reveals the dangerous limitations of a black politic of liberation that
is concerned with white racial supremacy but not cued into the
violent reality of intra-community misogyny and sexual assault. This
lack of dual focus has harmed black women throughout history.

To be fair, U.S. history provides much proof of
the extent to which white people, and the state, have gone to protect
white women from the archetypal dangerous black male. But Cosby's
case
should not be upheld as a contemporary example of white supremacy's
attempt to take down a black man, especially not now that Cosby has admitted
in court documents dating back to 2005 that he obtained prescription
Quaaludes for women he wanted to coerce into having sex with him. Cosby is no Emmett Till.

Beverly Johnson, Lachelle Covington, Michelle
Hurd, Angela Leslie and Jewel Allison are just some of the several dozen women
Cosby allegedly abused. And they, just like those Cosby supporters who
have claimed
the sexual assault allegations are a consequence of white media's
fascination with the demise
of the black man, are black. In the case of those black people who
publicly fight in support of Cosby, loyalty to race thus seems to also
be an implicit allegiance
to the cult of black patriarchy — black women's lives, well-being
and safety be damned.

Cosby is noEmmett Till.

As Mic's Jamilah King wrote in
reference to the allegations, "Sometimes it's hard to see
patriarchy. And sometimes it isn't." Patriarchy is evident when the
needs of alleged
male perpetrators, like Cosby, rather than alleged victims remain
centralized in conversations about sexual assault. Patriarchy is evident
when female victims are cast as antagonistic troublemakers in the
public eye, and
the men accused are cast as prey. Patriarchy is evident when men —
black, white or brown — push back against women's claims of rape even as
their evidence continues to mount, even as the fact remains that an estimated 1 in 5 black women experience rape in their lifetime.

"Rape is more protected in this
country than black women," Jamilah Lemieux writes at Ebony in response to the Cosby allegations. The
disavowal of black women's experiences is a problem whose roots can be
traced back to the sexual assault of black women in slave master's
bedrooms, and continues with the dismissal of black women's pain in
contemporary courts of public opinion and law.

Manago, Watkins, Pressley and others saw Cosby as a
victim, but viewed the women who publicly shared painful stories of
sexual violence as guilty of trying to take down a black man — one who,
ironically, is notorious for disparaging black people.

A black freedom fighter who claims to care for all
black lives but supports alleged rapists who harm black women is not
truly fighting for freedom. Black women deserve a black liberation ethos
that also destroys male dominance, sexual violence, rape culture,
sexism and patriarchy, especially when these show up within black
communities.

Monday, July 06, 2015

This newly created high school (school within a school) in Great Barrington, Massachusetts deserves a close read and I also recommend listening to the 14-minute, student-developed video below.

It's called the "Independent Project," which is somewhat misleading because while appropriately focused on students' motivations, passions, and cultivating their talents and developing new ones, it is also very oriented to the collective—important and germane to 21st century work environments, as well as to a humanitarian, critical, democratic, and social justice framework.

While this "experiment" may seem and feel new, radical, and totally organic—especially to the students, faculty, and leadership—it is actually recasting a research-based approach that already exists—most notably, among the New York Performance Standards Consortium (NYPSC) schools. Although they do administer a standardized test beginning in the 11th grade that the students must pass to graduate (i.e., most typically the English Language Arts Regents exam), the NYPSC schools otherwise get an annual waiver from New York's regimen of standardized tests—an affordance that is not available anywhere else in the country, at present, under NCLB.

I am personally familiar with three of these schools and find them to be nurturing, rigorous, intellectually challenging places, and "high stakes" in ways that map on well to the Independent Project discussed herein. In these environments, students are held accountable for their learning and their ideas and they must be publicly defensible. For more information, check out "New York Performance Standards Consortium Fact Sheet" (January 28, 2014). Also check out this earlier, related blog post In Kentucky, Moving Beyond Dependence On Tests.

Far from anything close to "educational anarchy," this school is engaged in serious project-based learning (PBL) that consists of both authentic learning opportunities for youth and authentic assessment which I fully support and again, is research based. Assuming that this school in Massachusetts actually has no connection to NYPSC schools or literature, what is really encouraging and pleasing is that the very model of schooling that these students "independently derived," already exists and with great success. Most positively, this approach suggests what could be a new, valid direction in public school reform.

Incidentally, Texas, State Rep. Mary Gonzalez actually had a bill along these lines (HB 406) in the last legislative session that would have created a pilot program of select high schools in select districts to develop and implement schools like these. Unfortunately, however, the bill did not come out of committee so we'll have to continue pursuing this for the next legislative session in 2017.

In any case, PBL and authentic learning and assessment have served NYPSC high school students quite well, resulting in dramatically better outcomes for all students, despite the greater presence of special needs children than in the general population. To wit, these schools evidence higher attendance, graduation, and college attendance rates than the general school population in New York City.

As a reform measure in what is also called, "inquiry-based learning," it must get coupled with smaller class sizes, individualized instruction, teacher planning time, and professional development opportunities. (There's a lot more to this, but this give you an idea of just how involved a move in this direction is.) In NYPSC schools, it's hard to get lost and fail. It practically creates a system where student failure is mythic. It's not so much whether you graduate, but when. In short, making schools learning friendly, curriculum friendly, teacher friendly, and student friendly holds tremendous promise for all the outcomes that we care about in education.

I can see how this idea could get hijacked by those wanting to eliminate public education (extreme homeschooling?) or who rhetorically misrepresent this as either "lacking in accountability" or as schools no longer needing teachers, justifying less investment in teachers or teaching. Actually, the opposite is true: A whole lot more is expected of teachers; they're just needed differently—more as facilitators, coaches, and guides—together with an enhanced capacity to truly evaluate youth where the latter is not an event—as it is under the current system—but rather an everyday affair. Particularly with the amount of time that it will take to make a shift like this in a way that is valid from a research-based perspective, is actually not a call for less, but rather more teacher work and involvement and as a corollary, greater district investment in teachers' professional development.

There is no reason why our entire state or country could not move in this direction. We have been so ensconced in our high-stakes testing and accountability systems that we have a lot of un-learning and new learning to do. We also know that this will not happen overnight. That's why a pilot study that is time delimited, transparent, with an evaluation, up for state review, and so on is a good first step for Texas. In fact, we should begin right now organizing learning communities on assessment that are inclusive of district leaders, teachers, community members (the key stakeholders of the reform), and our universities where much of this knowledge and memory of inquiry-based education exists.

We need state leaders like Representative Gonzalez in the legislature and in our school districts and communities far and wide to say, "Yes, we want to be accountable...yes, we seek equitable educational outcomes and better schools, but we need to make a fundamental shift in how our students are assessed." These inquiry-based approaches to education are definite signposts to not only a brighter—but also an immensely do-able, future.

When Sam Levin was a junior at Monument
Mountain Regional High School in Great Barrington, Mass., he realized
that two things were in short supply at his school: engagement and
mastery. He also noticed that he and his peers were learning plenty of
information, but not much about how to gather or create their own data.
And he noticed that students were unhappy. So he took it upon himself to
design a school where students would feel fully engaged, have an
opportunity to develop expertise in something, and learn how to learn.

“He came up with a plan where the core areas could still be studied,
but in a way where students were more of the driving force,” explains
guidance counselor Mike Powell. The administration decided to take a
chance on a semester-long pilot project, and The Independent Project
debuted in the fall of 2010.The pilot involved eight students — sophomores, juniors and seniors —
chosen on the basis of written applications and interviews. “The idea
was that it was for students who could manage their time well, were
looking for something more than the traditional program, and had a
passion for learning,” says Powell, who served as the group’s primary
adviser. Academic performance didn’t matter — the group included
straight-A students as well as students who were failing many of their
classes. The group was fairly diverse in other ways, too, with the
students hailing from a range of blue-collar and white-collar family
backgrounds.

“It really
establishes an idea of what self-motivation is. There is critiquing, but
it all comes back to you. That’s really valuable.”Their time, other than daily group meetings, was theirs to manage.
“This was pretty unheard of — teens being alone most of the day,” Powell
notes.They explored math, science, social science and literature topics
that interested them, choosing one question each week, researching it,
and presenting their findings to the group. They also chose books to
read, discuss and write about in some form; worked on a semester-long
individual project on a subject that excited them (the only requirement
was that the project require effort, learning and mastery); and
collaborated on a three-week-long group endeavor (they decided to make a video about education and their project).
They were responsible for giving a final presentation about their
project, which helped to give them a specific goal to work toward.

Sam Levin, creator of the Independent Project.

As the adviser, Powell checked in with the group every morning; he
also offered logistical support and helped the students locate
resources. Three other faculty members — a science teacher, a math
teacher and a social science teacher — served as an advisory committee,
meeting with the students for one period a day to help them in whatever
way was needed, such as to talk through some of the more complex ideas
presented in a research book. The students also consulted other teachers
and outside experts as needed. When members of the community were asked
to share their knowledge, “the vast majority of the time, they came
running,” Powell says.

CHALLENGES ALONG THE WAYThe program encountered some bumps. “We struggled with how to do
peer-to-peer constructive criticism,” Powell says. “It’s a bit different
in a classroom, where there’s a teacher setting boundaries and helping
create structure. They found doing that with peers challenging. But that
was a big part of the program—they had to be accountable for what they
were doing. … They’re teens, so to think that at that age they will
always make good choices and manage their time well is not realistic.
Even adults aren’t like that.”It was also difficult for some other faculty members to accept that
students were earning credit for such an amorphous undertaking. So the
group tried to be transparent and made their final presentations — which
ran the gamut from performances to cooking a large meal — open to the
public.At the end of the semester, “everyone was satisfied – the parents, the students, and the school,” Powell says. The project’s “White Paper”
notes that parents “were very aware of what was going on in the program
because the kids were talking about school at home much more than they
ever had in the past.”“There were so many moments where you could see students being
inspired,” Powell says. “And they learned that with that much control
comes a great deal of responsibility, to manage time and be
accountable.”The school chose to continue the program, which runs for one semester
each year and involves nine to 12 students who receive credit and a
pass/fail. “It was really risky, because we didn’t know how colleges
would interpret this on a transcript,” Powell says. “But so far we’ve
had only an overwhelmingly positive response,” including from highly
selective colleges, such as Oxford and Williams, that have accepted
graduates.Nevertheless, not a lot of students apply to participate in the
project. “They know it involves more work [than taking regular classes]
and that they have to push themselves to do it,” says science teacher
Daniel Gray, who served as the group’s primary adviser this year. (He
also had prior experience with this type of model—he had studied
democratic education and then helped introduce some of those principles
to a public middle school.)Most high school students are neither interested nor ready for such
an experience, he says. But he adds: “I think that if they had been
given progressively more responsibility over the years, they would be
ready. My seventh- and eighth-graders, after a year or two, they got it,
and they were more mature than you would expect them to be at that
age.”APPLYING LESSONS LEARNEDAlthough some teachers at Monument Mountain remain skeptical, the
majority of them now support the program. Some have even copied elements
of it, for example letting English students choose which books to read.
It has also spawned “positive” discussions about the most appropriate
role for teachers, Powell says.There have been a number of refinements over the years. One has been
to hold the program in the spring, to avoid a sudden and tough
transition back to taking regular classes where students can no longer
control what they’re learning. And the number of faculty assigned to the
project was reduced to three and then (for scheduling reasons) two.
Each group has also introduced its own twist — this year the students
had even more leeway and no subject-area requirements. The constants
have been the weekly research question, the books component, and the
individual endeavor, which has ranged from vocational pursuits such as
building a kayak, to artistic tasks such as writing a novel, to
scientific explorations such as examining how Western and Eastern
medicine deal differently with Lyme disease.Securing assistance from teachers sometimes proved challenging. “It’s
something most students aren’t used to doing,” says Logan Malik, a
just-graduated senior who organized the program this year. “Instead of a
teacher telling you what to do, you’re telling the teacher what you’re
learning, what you want information on, and when you want to meet. And
then they would have to do some prep.” Nevertheless, “teachers were very
willing to help us, even if it was on their own time.” (The students
also served as “a first-grade support group for each other,” Gray says.)Although he’s heading to college to study pre-med, Logan’s individual
endeavor this spring was to learn classical guitar. He watched a
YouTube tutorial to learn the proper fingering and then practiced about
four hours a day. He says he would never have been able to dive into the
activity like this if he’d continued with his rigorous course load, and
learning it over a summer wouldn’t have been as productive without a
group and some structure. The Independent Project work kept him busy, he
says, “but the busy-ness was easier to get through, compared to slaving
through something you don’t want to be doing and don’t value as much.”The stress was also less, because the evaluations (other than the
final pass/fail) were formative rather than summative — intended not to
judge, but to help students improve their work.It was challenging sometimes to stay on task to meet deadlines that
were not enforced by authorities, Malik says, “but we did well overall.”
The students tried to be flexible and fair, and to account for the
natural ebb and flow in people’s attention and motivation levels, as
well as unexpected complications. Extensions were granted to students
who asked for more time to research a question. “Once the person was
given an extra week, they felt they needed to do more, and they worked
hard,” Malik notes. Other times individuals were given a pass to give
them a chance to get back on track. In the past, when tensions have
arisen or the group’s energy has seemed particularly low, the group has
literally taken a hike, while discussing their goals and potential
improvements to the program.Malik enjoyed many of his regular classes and sees this program as a
complement rather than a complete replacement for them. “For a lot of
subjects, like chemistry, it’s good to be taught by someone, so the
structure of the class helps. And in social science, it’s good to be
introduced to ideas by someone who understands those ideas really well.”
But The Independent Project offers benefits that aren’t available in an
adult-led classroom, he adds. “It really establishes an idea of what
self-motivation is. There is critiquing, but it all comes back to you.
That’s really valuable.”

CHANGES IN STUDENTSStudents who have gone through the program ask more questions and
have a greater awareness of how to answer them; construct their
questions more carefully; became more thoughtful in the way they
consider ideas and evaluate sources; and became better at managing their
time.The “White Paper” also notes that the project instills a “sense of
ownership of their education has stayed with the students long after the
program ended. Although some students have continued to struggle
academically, feedback from parents has suggested that they are pursuing
more interests outside of school than they were before The Independent
Project.”

It continues: “That is not to say no one will fail; any program or
system will contain failure. In fact, in the pilot of the Independent
Project one student struggled to complete the work, and did not receive
full credit for the program … The goal, then, is to not make The
Independent Project so that no one fails, but to make it so fewer people
fail than in the current system, and to make success in The Independent
Project carry more intellectual meaning than success often does in the
current system.”The program doesn’t require a lot of additional resources, and other
public schools have visited Monument Valley to find out how to replicate
it. (A professional filmmaker has also produced a video about it.)
Powell says it requires administrators who are open to focusing
education on students, rather than teachers or a curriculum. But he
offers a caution: “Because the focus is on the student, that’s where you
need to start. This came from a student and was pushed by him, through
all the red tape. A program like this probably won’t be terribly
successful if it’s teacher-driven. If a group of adults want to
replicate this, … I would have conversations with the students about it,
and see how they respond and where they take it. If students are
interested in the concept, it will guide itself.”Meet some of the students in this video created by Charles Tsai.

Thursday, July 02, 2015

"White fragility." Good concept. -Angela

For
this week’s research brief, we’re highlighting the work of Robin
DiAngelo. She was recently interviewed by Sam Adler-Bell, a journalist
and policy associate at the Century Foundation, a NY-based think tank.
Last year, a white male Princeton undergraduate was asked by a
classmate to “check his privilege.” Offended by this suggestion, he shot
off a 1,300-word essay to the Tory, a right-wing campus newspaper.In
it, he wrote about his grandfather who fled the Nazis to Siberia, his
grandmother who survived a concentration camp in Germany, about the
humble wicker basket business they started in America. He railed against
his classmates for “diminishing everything [he’d] accomplished, all the
hard work [he’d] done.”
His missive was reprinted by Time. He was interviewed by the New York
Times and appeared on Fox News. He became a darling of white
conservatives across the country.
What he did not do, at any point, was consider whether being white
and male might have given him—if not his ancestors—some advantage in
achieving incredible success in America. He did not, in other words,
check his privilege.
To Robin DiAngelo, professor of multicutural education at Westfield State University and author of What Does it Mean to Be White? Developing White Racial Literacy, Tal Fortgang’s essay —indignant,
defensive, beside-the-point, somehow both self-pitying and
self-aggrandizing—followed a familiar script. As an anti-racist educator
for more than two decades, DiAngelo has heard versions of it recited
hundreds of times by white men and women in her workshops.
She’s heard it so many times, in fact, that she came up with a term for it: “white fragility,” which she defined in a 2011 journal article
as “a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes
intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include
outward display of emotions such as anger, fear and guilt, and behaviors
such as argumentation, silence and leaving the stress-inducing
situation.”
When the Black Lives Matter movement marched in the streets, holding
up traffic, disrupting commerce, and refusing to allow “normal life” to
resume—insofar as normalcy means a system that permits police and
vigilantes to murder black men and women with impunity—white people
found themselves in tense conversations online, with friends and in the
media about privilege, white supremacy and racism. You could say white
fragility was at an all-time high.
I spoke with DiAngelo about how to deal with all the fragile white people, and why it’s worth doing so.Sam Adler-Bell: How did you come to write about “white fragility”?
Robin DiAngelo: To be honest, I wanted to take it on because it’s a
frustrating dynamic that I encounter a lot. I don’t have a lot of
patience for it. And I wanted to put a mirror to it.
I do atypical work for a white person, which is that I lead primarily
white audiences in discussions on race every day, in workshops all over
the country. That has allowed me to observe very predictable patterns.
And one of those patterns is this inability to tolerate any kind of
challenge to our racial reality. We shut down or lash out or in whatever
way possible block any reflection from taking place.
Of course, it functions as means of resistance, but I think it’s also
useful to think about it as fragility, as inability to handle the
stress of conversations about race and racism
Sometimes it’s strategic, a very intentional push back and rebuttal.
But a lot of the time, the person simply cannot function. They regress
into an emotional state that prevents anybody from moving forward.SAB: Carla Murphy recently referenced “white fragility” in an article for Colorlines,
and I’ve seen it referenced on Twitter and Facebook a lot lately. It
seems like it’s having a moment. Why do you think that is?
RD: I think we get tired of certain terms. What I do used to be
called “diversity training,” then “cultural competency” and now,
“anti-racism.” These terms are really useful for periods of time, but
then they get coopted, and people build all this baggage around them,
and you have to come up with new terms or else people won’t engage.
And I think “white privilege” has reached that point. It rocked my world when I first really got it, when I came across Peggy McIntosh. It’s a really powerful start for people. But unfortunately it’s been played so much now that it turns people off.SAB: What causes white fragility to set in?
RD: For white people, their identities rest on the idea of racism as
about good or bad people, about moral or immoral singular acts, and if
we’re good, moral people we can’t be racist – we don’t engage in those
acts. This is one of the most effective adaptations of racism over
time—that we can think of racism as only something that individuals
either are or are not “doing.”
In large part, white fragility—the defensiveness, the fear of
conflict—is rooted in this good/bad binary. If you call someone out,
they think to themselves, “What you just said was that I am a bad
person, and that is intolerable to me.” It’s a deep challenge to the
core of our identity as good, moral people.
The good/bad binary is also what leads to the very unhelpful phenomenon of un-friending on Facebook.SAB: Right, because the instinct is to un-friend, to
dissociate from those bad white people, so that I’m not implicated in
their badness.
RD: When I’m doing a workshop with white people, I’ll often say, “If
we don’t work with each other, if we give in to that pull to separate,
who have we left to deal with the white person that we’ve given up on
and won’t address?SAB: A person of color.
RD: Exactly. And white fragility also comes from a deep sense of
entitlement. Think about it like this: from the time I opened my eyes, I
have been told that as a white person, I am superior to people of
color. There’s never been a space in which I have not been receiving
that message. From what hospital I was allowed to be born in, to how my
mother was treated by the staff, to who owned the hospital, to who
cleaned the rooms and took out the garbage. We are born into a racial
hierarchy, and every interaction with media and culture confirms it—our
sense that, at a fundamental level, we are superior.
And, the thing is, it feels good. Even though it contradicts our most
basic principles and values. So we know it, but we can never admit it.
It creates this kind of dangerous internal stew that gets enacted
externally in our interactions with people of color, and is crazy-making
for people of color. We have set the world up to preserve that internal
sense of superiority and also resist challenges to it. All while
denying that anything is going on and insisting that race is meaningless
to us.SAB: Something that amazes me is the sophistication of some
white people’s defensive maneuvers. I have a black friend who was
accused of “online harassment” by a white friend after he called her out
in a harsh way. What do you see going on there?
RD: First of all, whites often confuse comfort with safety. We say we
don’t feel safe, when what we mean is that we don’t feel comfortable.
Secondly, no white person looks at a person of color through objective
eyes. There’s been a lot of research in this area. Cross-racially, we do
not see with objective eyes. Now you add that he’s a black man. It’s
not a fluke that she picked the word “harassed.” In doing that, she’s
reinforcing a really classic, racist paradigm: White women and black
men. White women’s frailty and black men’s aggressiveness and danger.
But even if she is feeling that, which she very well may be, we
should be suspicious of our feelings in these interactions. There’s no
such thing as pure feeling. You have a feeling because you’ve filtered
the experience through a particular lens. The feeling is the outcome. It
probably feels natural, but of course it’s shaped by what you believe.SAB: There’s also the issue of “tone-policing” here, right?
RD: Yes. One of the things I try to work with white people on is
letting go of our criteria about how people of color give us feedback.
We have to build our stamina to just be humble and bear witness to the
pain we’ve caused.
In my workshops, one of the things I like to ask white people is,
“What are the rules for how people of color should give us feedback
about our racism? What are the rules, where did you get them, and whom
do they serve?” Usually those questions alone make the point.
It’s like if you’re standing on my head and I say, “Get off my head,”
and you respond, “Well, you need to tell me nicely.” I’d be like, “No.
Fuck you. Get off my fucking head.”
In the course of my work, I’ve had many people of color give me
feedback in ways that might be perceived as intense or emotional or
angry. And on one level, it’s personal—I did do that thing that
triggered the response, but at the same time it isn’t onlypersonal. I
represent a lifetime of people that have hurt them in the same way that I
just did.
And, honestly, the fact that they are willing to show me demonstrates, on some level, that they trust me.SAB: What do you mean?
RD: If people of color went around showing the pain they feel in
every moment that they feel it, they could be killed. It is dangerous.
They cannot always share their outrage about the injustice of racism.
White people can’t tolerate it. And we punish it severely—from job loss,
to violence, to murder.
For them to take that risk and show us, that is a moment of trust. I say, bring it on, thank you.
When I’m doing a workshop, I’ll often ask the people of color in the
room, somewhat facetiously, “How often have you given white people
feedback about our inevitable and often unconscious racist patterns and
had that go well for you?” And they laugh.
Because it just doesn’t go well. And so one time I asked, “What would
your daily life be like if you could just simply give us feedback, have
us receive it graciously, reflect on it and work to change the
behavior? What would your life be like?”
And this one man of color looked at me and said, “It would be revolutionary.”SAB: I notice as we’ve been talking that you almost always
use the word “we” when describing white people’s tendencies. Can you
tell me why you do that?
RD: Well, for one, I’m white (and you’re white). And even as
committed as I am, I’m not outside of anything that I’m talking about
here. If I went around saying white people this and white people that,
it would be a distancing move. I don’t want to reinforce the idea that
there are some whites who are done, and others that still need work.
There’s no being finished.
Plus, in my work, I’m usually addressing white audiences, and the
“we” diminishes defensiveness somewhat. It makes them more comfortable.
They see that I’m not just pointing fingers outward.SAB: Do you ever worry about re-centering whiteness?
RD: Well, yes. I continually struggle with that reality. By standing
up there as an authority on whiteness, I’m necessarily reinforcing my
authority as a white person. It goes with the territory. For example,
you’re interviewing me now, on whiteness, and people of color have been
saying these things for a very long time.
On the one hand, I know that in many ways, white people can hear me
in a way that they can’t hear people of color. They listen. So by god,
I’m going to use my voice to challenge racism. The only alternative I
can see is to not speak up and challenge racism. And that is not
acceptable to me.
It’s sort of a master’s tools dilemma.SAB: Yes, and racism is something that everyone thinks they’re an authority on.
RD: That drives me crazy. I’ll run into someone I haven’t seen in 20
years in the grocery store, and they’ll say, “Hi! What’ve you been
doing?”
And I say, “I got my Ph.D.”
And they say, “Oh wow, what in?”
“Race relations and white racial identity.”
And they’ll go “Oh, well you know. People just need to—”
As if they’re going to give me the one-sentence answer to arguably
the most challenging social dynamic of our time. Like, hey, why did I
knock myself out for 20 years studying, researching, and challenging
this within myself and others? I should have just come to you! And the
answer is so simple! I’ve never heard that one before!
Imagine if I was an astronomer. Everybody has a basic understanding
of the sky, but they would not debate an astronomer on astronomy. The
arrogance of white people faced with questions of race is unbelievable.~ Sam Adler-Bell is a journalist and policy associate at
the Century Foundation, a NY-based think tank. Follow him on Twitter:
@SamAdlerBell. This interview was originally published March 12, 2015 on Alternet.

“No one has ever asked me before,” the elder explained.
“She was answering my question about why she had never told anyone
about the abuse she suffered at Indian boarding school,” recalls Denise
Lajimodiere, professor of Education at North Dakota State University in
Fargo.
Lajimodiere, who also serves as president of the Boarding School Healing Coalition,
found that the other survivors she interviewed told her the same thing.
“Most of them had never even told their families,’ she says of
interviewees who often whispered when sharing details of the sexual
abuse they experienced at the schools.
Lajimodiere, a member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribe, is
working on a book containing ten of the most powerful survivor stories
she’s collected over the past few years. “I don’t want the book to be
academic; I want it to be their voices telling their stories.”
Her journey into the world of boarding schools and the unresolved
trauma associated with them began as a means to reconcile with her
father, who attended Chemawa boarding school in Oregon. “I wanted to
figure out my Dad’s violence and find a way to forgive him,” she says.

(Boarding School Healing Coalition)

After seeing an advertisement that the Boarding School Healing Project,
an organization that predated the Coalition, wanted researchers, she
applied and began interviewing survivors in North Dakota. “I went all
over the state, conducting the interviews in keeping with traditional
ways as much as I could. Afterwards, I’d go outside and sit in my car
and cry.”
Lajimodiere says her research about responses to unresolved trauma
and hearing the stories of survivors helped her understand her parents,
their harshness and lack of affection. (Her mother attended boarding
school in Wahpeton.) “They weren’t parented, they were just beaten.
“When I read that unresolved grieving is mourning that has not been
completed, with the ensuing depressions being absorbed by children from
birth onward, I felt like I had been punched in the gut. Years ago I had
come across the term ‘adult child of an alcoholic,’ and was shocked to
realize that it defined me. Once again, upon hearing the terms and
seeing the definitions of generational trauma and unresolved grieving, I
thought, “My god that is me; it is my family, my brother, my sister,
aunts, uncles, grandparents,” she wrote in the essay “A Healing Journey,” published in the Wicazo Sa Review.
Lajimodiere recalls an incident with her father after she began
researching the boarding school experience. “One day, about a year
before he died, I brought the documentaryIn the White Man’s Image
for my father to watch. The video spoke of the government’s attempt to
stamp out American Indian culture, language, tradition, stories, and
ceremonies. It reviewed the background of Captain Richard Pratt and
detailed his educational experiment designed to transform the Indian
into the white man’s image. Pratt’s first school, in Carlisle,
Pennsylvania, was profiled, and the second school, in Chemawa, near
Salem, Oregon, where my father was sent, was mentioned. The video
documented the use of whistles, bells, bugles, and military-style
punishment and daily regiment, the building of guard houses on school
campuses, kids dying of homesickness, disease, and poor nutrition. The
narrator said that boarding schools left a legacy of confused and lonely
children.

Captain
Richard Pratt designed boarding schools to transform the Indian into
the white man’s image. His first was Carlisle Indian Industrial School
in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. (Boarding School Healing Coalition)

“Following the video, and after a long silence, with head in hands,
he said softly, ‘So that’s what the goddamn hell they were trying to do
to us.’ The power and impact of his words slammed into me and I sat
trembling, fighting back tears, unable to say a word, unable to comfort
him. He had never learned, throughout his entire life, about the
government’s assimilation policy, why he was stolen, why his hair was
shaved off, why he was beaten for speaking Cree, why he had Christianity
forced on him. This was his soul wound,” she wrote in “A Healing Journey.”
She learned that her father nearly died from a beating at Chemawa and
that her mother was routinely locked in a closet during her boarding
school days.
Learning about her parents experiences and hearing their stories has
helped her and her family. “I had to forgive my parents after I
understood what happened to them.”

Classes at Chemewa began with 18 students—14 boys and 4 girls—all from the Puyallup Reservation. (Oregon State Library)

She hopes her work will lead others to understanding, forgiveness and
ultimately healing. “Before reconciling with the U.S government, we
need to reconcile among ourselves first,” she says, adding that Native
peoples need to create their own means to address internalized racism
and the impact of historical trauma. “No one can do it for us; we have
to do it for ourselves.”
She argues that the government has a legal and moral obligation to
support those efforts. “My hope is to see monies flood in from the U.S.
government in support of healing that is specific to historical trauma
especially relating to boarding schools. We need counselors who are
trained in the history of boarding schools, the losses or heritage, land
and family.”
She hopes to see a time when survivors and their families can have
access to a safe place in which to tell their stories. “Documenting
survivors stories helps create connective tissue between what happened
to them and what is happening in Indian country today. Allowing them to
tell their stories also provides a platform to demonstrate the courage
and resilience of Native peoples.”
Lajimodiere continues her work with the Coalition, which includes
documenting survivor stories, but often finds it emotionally exhausting.
“I have to take mini-breaks and care for my own psyche,” she says.
For instance, she recently received her mother’s records from
Wahpeton but has not yet been able to open the envelope. “I know I will
when I am ready,” she says.This project is made possible by support from The Rosalynn Carter Fellowships for Mental Health Journalism and Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California; the Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism.